My brother is currently writing his senior thesis on biblical masculinity. This has proven a great excuse to think about a biblical understanding of gender generally, as if I really needed one. Homosexuality and transgenderism are the hot topics of the day, and even before that, American society has always had more than one model of masculinity and femininity in the running. And no wonder–our God-given sexual identity cuts to the heart of who we are individually, touching on every other aspect of our lives, often in the most surprising of ways. It’s a very important, very personal issue, one that bears a lot of thinking about and a lot of discussion.

One of the interesting distinctions that has come about in the wake of the LGBT movement is that between sex and gender. At one point, these two words were considered interchangeable, and for many people they still are. But each has acquired a more specialized definition: sex refers to one’s biology, and gender refers to one’s behavior. Some people maintain that the two are independent of one another, that one’s gender is either a choice, or determined by something other than the raw physical facts. “I’m really a woman,” says man with functioning man parts. One’s anatomy, say some, should not determine what bathroom one uses any more than one’s skin color should.

Objections to this come from a variety of places, and the alternatives offered do not always agree with one another. If males must be masculine, and females must be feminine, how does this work? What does masculinity and femininity look like? Where does it come from?

These are difficult questions to answer, and they’re not made any easier by the postmodernist’s favorite problem: diversity of cultural norms. Masculinity in Hong Kong, or in Tokyo, does not look exactly like masculinity among the San people, or in Beverly Hills, or rural Appalachia. A backwoods Pentecostal from Deep East Texas and a respectable Nigerian woman from Lagos may both think they are feminine, but may not recognize it in each other, or in that girl from Portland.

Those who assert that gendered behavior is more than a cultural reality, that it is tied to one’s biological sex, and that there is a moral component to this—a group among which I count myself—have various solutions to this conundrum. Some ignore or undersell the cultural diversity. Some just shrug it off as the effects of sin on societies the world over, content in the assumption that their understanding of how men and women should behave is the transcendent norm. Others assert that there are certain general trends in behavior, and certain unhealthy deviations, but that it really is difficult to determine precisely what these are. How is one to disentangle healthy human nature from its cultural expressions? Is such a thing even possible?

That project is difficult one, involving a lot of study. It’s easy for Christians to point to the Bible as a shortcut, the divine revelation which lays out right and wrong for us. In one sense, this is very true, but that doesn’t make it simple. Whether it’s a blue-jeans wearing redneck who just got back from work, or a respectable office worker in his suit who just came back to his 2.5 kids and wife in the burbs, we carry a lot of cultural baggage to our reading of the Bible. Half the population is male, and the other half is female, and we’ve spent our entire lives around them. We already have ideas about masculinity and femininity, and which Biblical passages stand out to us as relevant, and which interpretations of them make sense, will be heavily colored by that experience.

There is an added layer of complication when we begin citing accounts of facts as divine commands. Some evangelicals have a bad habit of interpreting bible stories as God’s examples for how we ought to live our lives, without stopping to ask whether they are intended to be interpreted that way. This can get very hairy, and very entertaining, as people try to hash out the truly biblical baptismal practice where no explicit command is given. There are also some downright ridiculous arguments for every conceivable mode of church governance based on vaguely worded statements of what New Testament churches did. None of these have the clarity and power of the Ten Commandments, a straightforward delivery of divine law, or of some of the commands of Jesus in the Gospels. We should keep this in mind when we address any topic, gender and sexuality included.

Some of my favorite discussions of masculinity and femininity come from people who take a look at the psychological and social impact of biology. How does the ability to get pregnant, having a body crafted to nurture new life, and having regular biological reminders of the fact, effect how women understand themselves? How does the disconnect between male experience of sexuality and male experience of reproduction effect how men view themselves? And how do each of these sets of facts impact how one sex/gender looks at the other?

I think this line of questioning is extraordinarily helpful. Chasing down that rabbit trail quickly reveals explanations for general trends in how men and women conduct themselves across cultures, and also sheds some light on the places where those cultures differ, and why. It also offers helpful suggestions as to why we are seeing this sudden trend of acceptance of LGBT culture in America. Some of the things that have long accompanied being a man or woman in America are being eroded by modern medical technology, among other things.

But as I was considering this the other day, another important distinction struck me. If one attaches moral implications to biological realities—a kind of natural law thinking—then a whole new set of questions come up. The fact is, technology does loosen the hold of biology on men and women. Some of this may be negative, but some is assuredly positive. The same hormone replacement therapy used by transgender individuals to more resemble the sex they identify as, is also used by people whose natural bodily functions, through disease, accident, or birth defect, have ceased. And this number is not as small as might be convenient for those of us with Luddite tendencies. Modern medical science has a real impact on gender and sexuality, and not all of it is what a Christian could, at face value, call bad.

Those grey areas, the twilight zone of these discussions, are not the only place that natural law arguments for gender norms encounter rough sailing. Say a young man growing up in the rural South went to an evangelical church every Sunday, attended a Christian school, listened incessantly to Focus on the Family, and filled his head with country music lyrics. Take another young man and raise him on Canon Press books, let him soak up courtship culture, expose him to John Piper and Mark Driscoll, and let him attend an ACCS school in the Northwest. In the grand scheme of world cultures, the two are not far apart, but ask them to point out feminism, or what headship means, and you’ll get answers that look nothing alike.

Obviously, this is an experiment I have conducted the entertaining way. Both of these individuals might agree that God has expectations regarding gender, might tie these expectations back to biological realities, and might generally agree that American culture is currently nuts on the issue. But that northwestern individual makes me very uncomfortable with his views on a woman’s place. I expect, based on experience and (I think) biblical precedent that a woman is fully capable of doing, and doing well, lots of things which that guy would say she should not do based on the fact that she is a woman. God has made men one way, and women another, and therefore women should not infringe upon masculine territory. His view of gender roles is far more ironclad than my own, in a very significant way, despite all the similarities we might have in common.

Should women initiate a relationship? Should she give a potential mate who is taking too long to pop the question a subtle hint, or leave such things to her father? Does her father have authority over her once she is old enough to provide for herself? Should a woman ever go out and provide for herself? Once married, should she take a job outside the home? Does the type of job matter? Should women be in the military at all, even in supporting roles? Is it acceptable or even desirable for a woman to be more intellectual, or even wiser than her husband? Should wives be willing to tell their husband they are wrong? How far is obedience commanded? Should marriage look more like a partnership, or like the relationship between a parent and a particularly competent child?

If you are not a woman reading this, imagine you are a woman reading this. See? This is where feminism comes from—two college guys sitting around debating the place of women. Maybe women should have a say in all this. But wait, isn’t this an issue of biblical interpretation? Are women allowed to talk about this stuff? I Timothy 2? See, it gets hairy quickly. Strong feelings are had.

At any rate, in my contemplation of the issue, and my consideration of past discussions, I realized the need for a crucial distinction. There is a big difference between saying someone is doing something which nature does not ordinarily allow them to do, and saying they are doing something which contradicts, twists, or denies their nature. Most men don’t run all that fast, yet Usain Bolt exists. Ordinary people can’t solve a Rubik’s cube in under sixty second, blindfolded. Yet these people exist, and I would hesitate to castigate them for it.

This distinction between acting contrary to one’s nature and being on the extreme end of it is an important one. One might argue from biology or from general observation of humans at work that some activities are far more normal for men and others for women. Yet I hesitate to say that this means women should not participate in activities ordinarily dominated by men, if they have the capability and the inclination.

That semi-imaginary northwesterner and I might both be on the conservative end of these issues, but, to cite a biblical example, he finds the prophetess Deborah a real inconvenience. Women are not supposed to be prophets. How can he explain this away? Maybe no men were doing their job at the time, so a woman had to? He likewise frowns disapprovingly at the apocryphal tale of Judith. I, on the other hand, think it’s pretty cool. Is it because I’m a sellout to radical egalitarianism? No, I just maintain a distinction he does not. Deborah and Judith may have been unusual, but they were not a perversion of femininity.

This places me in a position I am very comfortable with. I do not necessarily have as many pat answers as the self-proclaimed patriarchal crowd to the one side or the people who make gender entirely a social construct on the other. Their systems are much tighter than mine. But I can, on the one hand, embrace masculinity and femininity as beautiful things, as positive virtues, and, on the other hand, be perfectly content with the fact that a woman might be a much better scholar than me, a better leader, or play a much meaner game of volleyball. Especially the volleyball thing. I hate volleyball. You go girl, just leave me out of it.

This is certainly a perspective that includes serious expectations and even hard and fast rules, but it’s also a far more relaxed. Maintain this distinction, and you can take the people as they come, giving a little consideration to the fact that they are God’s servant, not yours, and there may be more than one way to be masculine or feminine, and there may be more going on than what you see at first blush. It allows you to—dare I say it—accept the fact of your own ignorance. And it’s charitable. I like that. It’s nice.

The Myth of Progress

“Progress” is a word filled to bursting with meaning. It conjures up the idea of forward motion in time, but not just idle motion. Progress means improvement; it means striving towards a goal. While this may mean inching along towards the completion of a task, or towards victory in a video game, it can also refer to entire societies. Cultures progress from an undesirable past towards a desirable future, from barbarism to civilization. Attached to that shade of meaning are ideas of movement from authoritarianism to freedom, from inequality to egalitarianism, from injustice to justice, and from want to plenty. Progress is good, in a way that has moral connotations.

In an odd historical quirk, this progressive social and political outlook was coming into vogue at about the same time as Darwin’s theory of evolution was becoming well entrenched in the scientific establishment, and taking the popular imagination by storm. Just as technology, democracy, and scientific exploration seemed to urge us forward into a brighter future, we were greeted with a mental picture of life evolving from slime, to primitive creatures, to reptiles, to rodent-like mammals, then to primates, and finally into man. Not only did society seem to progress, so did biological life itself. And, holding these two parallel narratives at the same time, progress took on an aura of inevitability.

While it is not the purpose of this project to investigate how these things came to be, it is worth pointing out just how startlingly new this perspective was. Classical philosophy as well as most Christian theology up to that point were based on the assumption of an unchanging natural order. The Creator had designed all things in particular ways, for particular purposes. For things to alter their innate natures was not progress in any sense, but a twisting, a perversion—unnatural. Certainly a great deal of freedom existed for things acting in accordance with their nature, but to actually deviate from one’s nature was not freedom, but self-destruction.

It seems odd to call this classical view “conservative.” It may often demand that things change when the unnatural has become the norm. However, in contrast to the progressive narrative of continuous change, of constant movement, it certainly merits that label. In a very real sense, it is the philosophy which believes there are things worth conserving—that sitting still does not always mean stagnation. Of course, this only makes sense in contrast to progressivism. In other contexts, such philosophical views might call for another name entirely.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these twin notions of social progress and biological evolution were very much on the public’s midn. As this new philosophy arose, H. G. Wells was quick to take threads from it and weave them into a haunting little myth called The Time Machine. As it frequently does, the plot devices of science fiction allowed an able author to explore deep philosophical issues. In particular, Wells illuminated the gulf between the world that biological evolution implied, and the world progressivism hoped for.

The Time Machine

As in The Island of Doctor Moreau, our protagonist is a scientist. When the story begins, we observe him at a dinner party, explaining to fellow-scientists and other interested parties that time is merely another dimension, and sufficiently advanced technology should enable us to move through that dimension as easily as we control our movements through the other three. He declares that he has built a machine capable of doing this, and in a week’s time appears at a second dinner party, where he recounts his journey.

The Time Traveler’s first journey takes him some eight hundred thousand years into the future, to a world that would be perfectly at home in an episode of Star Trek’s original series. The paradisiacal landscape, drastically changed by the passage of time and changing climate from the land the Traveler called home, is inhabited by a race of small people. The two sexes of this miniature race are hardly distinguishable, and neither is imbued with a great deal of strength or cunning. Though clearly adults, they possess a childlike quality, and enjoy a carefree existence. Over the course of the book, the Time Traveler forms a series of theories about how mankind has evolved into these gentle creatures, who call themselves “Eloi.”

At first, he is quite surprised by them. They seem rather foolish, and though they live in magnificent, advanced buildings, they seem incapable of maintaining them, and entirely devoid of general curiosity. These are hardly the advanced, highly evolved humans he expected to meet.

‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!’

The Time Traveler had expected humanity to progress into a communist utopia wherein complete mastery over creation would enable mankind to live a life of ease and comfort. But a life of ease and comfort does not call for strength or wit. All those great survival instincts of man, unused in a world of total security, had atrophied. In its old age, the human race had become feeble.

Already this reasonable and seemingly obvious deduction has disabused our protagonist of traditional notions of progress. Successful progress is not necessarily permanent, and evolution need not always follow a forward path. This theory is itself put to the test not long after, however, when the Time Machine goes missing. The Traveler is now stranded in that distant era, with no clear way of escape. He had hoped to find a society of people more advanced than himself, and now he is trapped in a world of particularly uninspired, unintelligent children.

It soon becomes clear that the thieves are a second race descended from what was once humanity. These creatures are monstrous and apelike, dwelling deep in the underground darkness. Pursing them into their labyrinthine tunnels, he discovers all the machinery which must have once enabled them to build the advanced structures on the planet’s surface. Confronted with these facts, he forms a new theory.

Rather than class distinctions passing away with the dawn of a new communist utopia, what if they only deepened? The upper classes led a progressively easier existence on the surface, while the working classes labored deep underground. This radical difference in lifestyles, which he notes already exists to some extent in his own industrial age, split the species in two over the passing eons, the master race becoming weak and pampered as the slave race become bestial.

Again, the idea of perpetual forward progress is undermined. Though technology may have advanced for some unknown length of time, it eventually failed as neither the manual labor nor the pampered beneficiaries of their work remembered quite how to maintain or operate the machinery. Furthermore, society itself had never really improved, clinging always to the same old injustices that had plagued humanity throughout its existence.

Finally, not long after, the Time Traveler discovers the true relationship of the subterranean Morlocks to the terrestrial Eloi. At some point in the distant past, these apelike children of the underclasses had run out of food, and had begun to feast on the flesh of the Eloi. The surface-dwelling species does not exist independently of the troglodytes below. Having used fellow man as a resource, they have themselves become a resource.

Instinctively horrified by this revelation, he tries to rationalize it away. After all, there is more distance between the two species, and between himself and either of them, than there is between as civilized Briton of the nineteenth century and the cannibals of the same era. It is not true man-eating, merely one species raising another as livestock.

His attempt at rationalization fails. He cannot help but see this far end of humanity’s history as a descent back into barbarism. This is primarily because of his close friendship with one of the still humanlike Eloi—a female named Weena. She has been his constant companion for some time, and he has begun to think of the place in which he lives with her as home. As he contemplates the dark secrets lying beneath the earth, she dances innocently nearby. His sympathies are decidedly with the Eloi.

But this is no fairy tale, either for humanity or for Weena. On a journey back from his explorations of the Morlock’s dwellings, they are surrounded in the woods by the cave-men. The Time Traveler starts a fire to ward them off, which quickly grows out of control. In that conflagration, many of the Morlocks are lost, but so is Weena. He rushes back “home” alone.

Once there, he sees one of the strange buildings which were formerly locked lying open. Inside is his time machine. Clearly the Morlocks are using it as bait for him, but he doesn’t care. He rushes in, activates the machine, and leaps forward through time, barely escaping the grasp of the predatory Morlocks, and the horror and disappointment of the era in which he had so long been trapped.

As he moves forward, thirty million years into the future and beyond, no great race arises to replace fallen man. All the varied vegetation of that age degenerates into simple lichens, and enormous crabs chase giant butterflies across the earth—some of the last living species. Slowly the planet achieves tidal lock with the sun, one side eternally facing it, and one side facing the darkness of space. Life grows stranger, more primitive, and begins to die out. Not only has sentience faded away, not only is life passing from the earth, but in the swelling of the sun he foresees the death of the planet itself. Forward motion does not mean progress. It often means death.

Distressed, he rushes back, past the giant crustaceans, past the Eloi and Morlocks, back to his own era. There he stumbles into the dinner party, tells his story, and presents as evidence a few flowers Weena put in his pocket. Those two flowers, the narrator suggests, represent a single simple fact. This narrator contemplates that fact later, after the restless Time Traveler disappears once more, his destination unknown, never to return.

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.”

Debunking the Myth of Progress

Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the best, whether the strongest and smartest, or the kindest. As convenient as that narrative might be for progressives, it simply does not arise from the theory of evolution.

Survival of the fittest means the survival of those best equipped to pass on their genes in a given environment. This may certainly mean the strongest and the smartest, the most able to master their environment. A rabbit, however, passes on his genes just as effectively as any predator or intelligent omnivore in the same ecosystem. Simply breeding quickly is favored as much by evolution as anything we might call progress.

In fact, if a situation changes rapidly, the attributes which gave one species strength in the previous era might mean nothing in the era that follows it. A polar bear might be the apex predator of the Arctic, but would be hard-pressed to survive in the heat of the tropics. A frog is better equipped to survive in that environment. A giant squid survives well enough in the salty depths of the ocean, but in a freshwater inland lake, a minnow has a better chance of surviving. Or, to draw from another pop culture trope, it’s the cockroaches that would survive a nuclear war, not us.

If evolutionary theory is right, then the only thing that keeps us intelligent as a race is the fact that we have to be to survive. The same could be said of most any other attribute: our tendency to stick together, our drive to explore, our ability to train and push ourselves to the breaking point. The human species is tough, but take away the need to be tough, and we don’t need any of those attributes to live long enough to pass on our genes. The weak, the unintelligent, the lazy, all have just as much of a chance to pass on their genes as anyone else. Most progressives today would not, of course, have it any other way. But the long-term consequences of this are more or less what Wells predicts—the Eloi. Threats keep us sharp, whether the threat of predators, starvation, rivals, or bad weather. Remove those, and we turn into children.

Confronted with this fact, there is more than one way to react. Robert E. Howard sees this, and praises barbarism. If it takes living on the edge, under constant threat to be the best that we can be, then hang civilization. Let’s go back to the woods. There are times when Star Trek’s Captain Kirk seems to follow this same line. Better adventure, exploration, and risk with the virtues those things keep alive in us, than an easy life and slow decay.

Many progressives hope there is an alternative. Perhaps it is true that an easy life leads to the withering of the species, but what if we push beyond the limits of every other species? What if we grow advanced enough to control the course of our own evolution? Or what if we transcend organic life itself? These are the dreams of transhumanist, looking to a future when natural law no longer applies to us. If we choose that course, we must hope that such things are possible, that they are more than the pipe dream of a race unable to come to terms with its own mortality.

Then again, one could just ignore the facts, or at least regard our eventual demise as something unavoidable and so not worth avoiding. The values of progressivism become more important than the survival of the human species. Better we achieve a just, secure, and prosperous society and die of it, than ensure the survival of the species at the price of suffering for its weaker members. That certainly seems a noble path, but it can’t be said to derive its values from evolutionary theory. Then again, why should it? Progressives are under no obligation to buy evolutionary theory wholesale, much less derive their values from a biological theory.

And that is the point. The progressive narrative and evolutionary theory have little or nothing to do with one another. It is an accident of history that they arose at the same time, and an accident of history that they became allies against creationism and conservatism. One is concerned with the good of society and political theory, and the other is concerned with the structure and workings of the natural world. They originate from different sources, are concerned with different realms and different issues, and their implications for those who believe in them are quite separate. If one were to examine the mythologies that support and explain those two worldviews, the works included in such canons would differ widely, despite the occasional overlap.

Conservative, creationist Christians have a bad habit of lumping all our opponents in the public square into one category: you are either Christian or non-Christian. In practice, this categorization simply makes no sense. A Muslim and a militant atheist who subscribes to evolutionary theory may be much closer in spirit than either of them and the liberal progressive. Darwinism can be used to justify capitalism and racism as easily as it can socialism and multiculturalism. The world is far more complex than us vs. them.

It is true that on a deeper level, the blood of Christ makes us more separate from the world than any two groups in the world are from each other. But that does not mean that the differences between non-Christians are not real, and do not have consequences. If we want to be a light in a dark world, if we want to take an evangelical attitude towards the lost, we will not be successful by paying no attention to who they are, what they believe, and what they value. The distinctions there are important, and worth noting.

This is just one reason why it’s important to get outside the distinctly Christian ghettoes in pop culture. There are important things to learn about our neighbors, about the world we claim to want to bring the Gospel to. That’s the point of this project, and that’s why reading guys like H. G. Wells is valuable.